Women in Russian Culture and

Society, 1700–1825
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Women in Russian
Culture and Society,
1700–1825

Edited by

Wendy Rosslyn
and

Alessandra Tosi
Editorial matter and selection © Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi 2007.
Introduction and Chapter 3 © Alessandra Tosi 2007.
Chapter 11 and Appendix © Wendy Rosslyn 2007.
All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2007.

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-230-55323-1

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Contents

List of Tables vii

Acknowledgements viii

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1
Alessandra Tosi

Part I Women and the Arts

1 Signs from Empresses and Actresses: Women

and Theatre in the Eighteenth Century 9
Lurana Donnels O’Malley

2 Female Serfs in the Performing World 24

Richard Stites

3 Women and Literature, Women in Literature:

Female Authors of Fiction in the Early
Nineteenth Century 39
Alessandra Tosi

4 Women’s Travel and Travel Writing in

Russia, 1700–1825 63
Sara Dickinson

5 The First Russian Women’s Journals and the

Construction of the Reader 83
Gitta Hammarberg

Part II Women and Society

6 ‘Without Going to a Regular Court …’: The Phenomenon

of the ‘Divorce Letter’ in Petrine Russia 107
Ol’ga Kosheleva

7 The Function of Fashion: Women and Clothing

at the Russian Court (1700–1762) 125
Paul Keenan

v
vi Contents

8 Merchant Women in Business in the Late

Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries 144
Galina Ul’ianova

Part III Femininity and Religious Life

9 Sacralising Female Rule, 1725–1761 171

Gary Marker

10 Female Orthodox Monasticism in

Eighteenth–Century Imperial Russia: The
Experience of Nizhnii Novgorod 191
William G. Wagner

11 Women with a Mission: British Female Evangelicals

in the Russian Empire in the Early Nineteenth Century 219
Wendy Rosslyn

Select Bibliography (2001–2006): Women in Russian

Culture and Society, 1700–1825 241
Wendy Rosslyn

Index 251
List of Tables

8.1 Number of enterprises owned by women

by branch of industrial activity 151
8.2 Soap-boiling enterprises in Kazan’ 156
8.3 Data on women of the merchant estate
and the value of their property lost in consequence
of the burning of Moscow during the war of 1812–1852 160
10.1 Convents in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese
(1799 borders), during the eighteenth century 196

vii
Acknowledgements

The editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Universities of

Exeter and Nottingham in funding preparations for this volume.

viii
Notes on Contributors

Sara Dickinson has degrees in Slavic studies from the University of

Chicago, Indiana University, and Harvard. A specialist in eighteenth-
and early-nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture, she currently
teaches at the Università degli Studi di Genova. Her recent publications
include the book Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia
from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin (2006) and several articles, including
‘Representing Moscow in 1812: Sentimentalist Echoes in Accounts of
the Napoleonic Occupation’ (in Moscow and Petersburg: The City in
Russian Culture, ed. Ian K. Lilly, 2002) and ‘The Russian Tour of Europe
Before Fonvizin: Travel Writing as Literary Endeavor in Eighteenth-
Century Russia’ (Slavic and East European Journal, 2001).

Gitta Hammarberg is Dewitt Wallace Professor at Macalester College,

where she has taught Russian literature and language since receiving her
PhD at the University of Michigan in 1983. She has published a book
From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin’s Sentimentalist Prose (1991, 2006)
and authored articles on minor sentimentalists, album verse and literary
trivia, women’s journals, memoirs, Russian spa culture, and Gogol. She is
currently working on a monograph on Karamzin’s heirs and the
feminisation of Alexandrine culture (Time of Peter the Great, 2004).

Paul Keenan is currently a Tutorial Fellow in the Department of

International History in the London School of Economics and Political
Science. He recently completed his doctorate (at the School of Slavonic
and East European Studies, University College London) on the social and
cultural development of St Petersburg in the first half of the eighteenth
century, with a particular focus on the influence of the Imperial court.

Ol’ga Kosheleva is Leading Research Fellow in the Department of

History, Institute of Theory and History of Russian Pedagogy at the
Academy of Education in Moscow. Her recent publications include
‘Episodes from Women’s Lives in the Reign of Peter I’ in Women and
Gender in 18th-Century Russia, edited by Wendy Rosslyn (2003) and the
volume Liudi Sankt-Peterburgskogo ostrova Petrovskogo vremeni (The People
of St Peterburg Island in the Petrine Era).
Gary Marker is Professor of Russian History at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook. He has published numerous studies of print

ix
x Notes on Contributors

culture, literacy, reading, and education during the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries. Over the past several years his work has focused on
questions of gender and religion, including the writings of the mem-
oirist, Anna Labzina, and the forthcoming An Imperial Saint: The
Veneration of Saint Catherine and the Advent of Female Rule in Russia. His
latest project, tentatively entitled Mazepa and the Preachers, examines the
role of the Orthodox hierarchs in articulating a new national idea at the
beginning of the eighteenth century.

Lurana Donnels O’Malley is Professor of Theatre at the University of

Hawaii, where she teaches Theatre History and Directing. Her writings
about the drama of Catherine II have appeared in such journals as
Comparative Drama, Slavic and East European Journal, Essays in Theatre,
and Theatre History Studies. She has edited and translated Two Comedies
by Catherine the Great (1998). Her newest book is The Dramatic Works of
Catherine the Great: Theatre and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Russia
(2006).

Wendy Rosslyn is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of

Nottingham. Her research on Russian women in the eighteenth century
includes books and articles on female poets and translators, notably
Anna Bunina (1774–1829) and the Origins of Women’s Poetry in Russia
(1997) and Feats of Agreeable Usefulness: Translations by Russian Women
1763–1825 (2000). She is also the editor of Women and Gender in
Eighteenth-Century Russia (2003). Her most recent research is on women’s
philanthropy and voluntary associations (Deeds, not Words: The Origins
of Women’s Philanthropy in the Russian Empire, 2007).

Richard Stites is Professor of Russian History at Georgetown University’s

School of Foreign Service and has written The Women’s Liberation
Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (1978),
Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Social Experiment in the Russian
Revolution (1989), winner of the AAASS Vucinich Prize for 1989, Russian
Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (1992), History of
Russia Since 1800, with Catherine Evtukhov (2004), and Serfdom, Society,
and the Arts in Imperial Russia (2005).

Alessandra Tosi is Lecturer in Russian at Exeter University, Research

Associate of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and Harold Hyam
Wingate Fellow. Her research focuses on early-nineteenth-century Russian
fiction, comparative literature, and gender studies. Her most recent publi-
cation is Waiting for Pushkin: Russian Fiction in the Reign of Alexander I
(1801–1825) (2006); she is currently writing a book on Princess Zinaida
 Notes on Contributors xi

Volkonskaia. Dr Tosi is also co-editor of the Study Group on Eighteenth-

Century Russia Newsletter.

Galina Ul’ianova is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Studies in

Russian History of the Nineteenth Century at the Institute of Russian
History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. She is also a mem-
ber of the advisory committee of the journal Russian Studies in History.
Her principal publications include Blagotvoritel’nost’ moskovskikh pred-
prinimatelei, 1860–1914 (The Charity of Moscow Entrepreneurs, 1860–1914,
1999) and Blagotvoritel’nost’ v Rossiiskoi imperii: XIX – nachalo XX veka
(Charity in the Russian Empire in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries, 2005).

William G. Wagner is Brown Professor of History and chair of the

History Department at Williams College, Williamstown, MA, author of
Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (1994) and co-compiler
and editor of Russian Women, 1698–1917: Experience and Expression: An
Anthology of Sources (2002). He has written numerous articles and essays
on pre-Revolutionary Russian law, religion, and women. He is currently
completing a book entitled Russian Sisters: Monasticism, Modernity, and
the Nizhnii Novgorod Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, 1764–1935.